


Joyride

by LtLJ



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Friendship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-21
Updated: 2007-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:48:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LtLJ/pseuds/LtLJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But if his first time to fly a jumper had been like coming home, the little ship wrapping around him like a friend, then the first time in an F-302 was like sex with a beautiful stranger. Set in season two, between The Siege III and Intruder. Written for the SG_Flyboys challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Joyride

Now that John was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and officially in command of Atlantis' military contingent, he had to get checked out on the F-302s. And since apparently nobody had thought it was very likely that this eventuality would ever come to pass, there was now a rush to get it done before the _Daedalus_ left for Atlantis.

Instead of a flight from Colorado Springs to the secret F-302 training base in Nevada, the _Daedalus_ was going to just beam John and Mitchell directly there from the SGC. The ship was in a near polar orbit and they were in the conference room under the mountain, waiting for their transport window, when Mitchell looked at John, grinned challengingly, and said, "You ready for this?"

John had resolved to be on his best behavior, because there was no way in hell he was going to chance screwing this up. So he just smiled blandly and said, "Sure." John had flown jumpers through orbiting stargates and into hive ships, skimmed the surfaces of purple oceans and arid moons and threaded the rings of gas giants. He thought taking a couple of loops above the Earth in an F-302, a ship that wouldn't even be responding to his every thought, would be interesting but not necessarily the coolest thing ever.

Okay, so it turned out he was wrong about that.

They got beamed from the cool conditioned air of the SGC straight to the dry dusty morning heat of a Nevada hangar. One wall was open to the sun and the long stretch of empty sand and scrub. One of the F-302s had been lifted up from the special underground bunker below the hangar where the ships were actually kept, and John got his first in-person look. He kept his expression laconic for Mitchell's benefit, but privately he had to admit that the F-302 was pretty hot.

They went down into the base training rooms for the briefing, the simulator, and everything else they had to get through first. That was every bit as boring and routine as John had expected. There was a little weirdness due to the fact that Atlantis was still so highly classified that even the guys who took care of the top-secret spaceships didn't get to know who John was. A little half-circle of them, young geeky techs to old geeky techs, male and female, stood around John while he learned the control board from the simulator's panel. They were staring a lot and trying to glean information without actually asking.

"So how's Antarctica?" one guy tried casually, which told John everything he needed to know. They must have gotten some info on him, enough to know about the black mark and his exile to McMurdo. But that wouldn't mesh with John's suddenly incredibly high security clearance or the fact that he was getting special rush F-302 training by a member of SG-1.

"Cold," John said, bland and friendly and giving absolutely nothing away.

Mitchell had picked up on it too, and gave the guy a particularly withering look, making it clear that the attempt was so lame that Mitchell couldn't even be bothered to get pissed off about it. The techs looked embarrassed, and Mitchell turned back to John. "The guidance system is similar to what you'll see on the BC-303s, only..."

Later, during a quick break, John was going down the hall to the coffeemaker when he heard voices through an open doorway. He stopped to listen. "--still don't know who he is. He came with that new guy from SG-1, you know, the one they dumped it on after O'Neill left--"

"I called a climatologist who just got back from McMurdo. He was there for three months and he said there was nobody named Sheppard up there--"

Somebody laughed. "Maybe the rank and name are just a cover and he's actually an alien."

Unable to resist, John ducked his head in the doorway. Three techs flinched as he asked earnestly, "Hey, you know if there's any creamer?"

_New guy from SG-1,_ John thought, heading down the corridor again. He wondered if Mitchell ran into this kind of thing often, as the new member of SG-1 that nobody had heard of yet. If he was still seen as an outsider no matter how long he had been there and how much his team accepted him. Like a fifth Beatle. _That has to suck._

Based on that, John let himself be less laconic and show more of his genuine interest for the next part of the training.

He couldn't tell if Mitchell appreciated the difference.

  
***

  
Finally they suited up and got into the actual F-302, with John in the pilot's seat and Mitchell behind him as flight instructor. Mitchell got clearance and John took the F-302 up just like he was supposed to.

The ship shot up through the troposphere and beyond, the atmospheric layers dropping away as they gained altitude, the sky giving way to the stars, until they passed the 690 km point. The earth was below them, a big blue-green water planet, laced with clouds. They had a window of flight time where radar pointed in this direction wasn't supposed to notice them, but it wouldn't last long.

And it was still weird, to think how something that a year ago would have been a huge moment in John's life was now almost routine; how much had changed, how much he had changed.

They finished the standard set of training maneuvers and then Mitchell, sounding as bored as John, said, "Okay, forget that shit. Open 'er up."

John hesitated, wary by long ingrained habit. He had some suspicions about just how hard Elizabeth had had to push to get him assigned as CO. He knew some people in the Pentagon would love it if he went nuts in an F-302, in time to cancel that assignment. "With the flight recorder on?"

"Of course with the--" Mitchell stopped, obviously getting what John meant. There was an uncomfortable silence. Then Mitchell cleared his throat, and formally recorded permission for a "rigorous" test of stress tolerances involving extreme maneuvers. Then he checked in with Flight to inform them, and got the controller's acknowledgement.

So John opened her up.

  
***

  
Suddenly they were out of time. They only had clearance for so long, and Flight was starting to get antsy. Mitchell acknowledged the controller as John started their re-entry procedure. It was hard to keep his mind on it. His nerves were vibrating, his skin felt electric. He knew he would get used to it, he had felt like this the first time he had flown Jumper One. But if his first time to fly a jumper had been like coming home, the little ship wrapping around him like a friend, then the first time in an F-302 was like sex with a beautiful stranger. John managed, "That was...uh."

"The first time is always..." Mitchell started, then couldn't seem to finish.

"It's like that with the jumpers," John tried to agree. "The first time..." Okay, now he knew why Mitchell had stopped, because he couldn't think of a way to finish that sentence that didn't sound a) stupid or b) like they'd been up here jerking off.

It was night in Nevada when they landed, the ship setting down in the stark desert under a clear moonlit sky. But by the time the paperwork was finished and the F-302 was back in the bunker, they had missed their beam-up window for the _Daedalus_. They were stuck here, sitting around the techs' break room, until the BC-303 came back in range.

John was as tense as wire and the idea of drinking coffee with the curious techs for however long it took the _Daedalus_ to get around to them was actively painful. Mitchell must have felt it too, because he was pacing, jittering with energy in a way he normally didn't. He finally said, "You want to go for a drive?"

  
***

  
What was available in the motor pool was a battered sedan that had seen better days, but rolling the windows down and taking the long straight highway under the moonlight made up for it.

They drove off the base, out into the middle of nowhere. The rock formations in the distance were shapes against the starry sky, softened by the darkness; they could have been the ruins of an Ancient city. John reminded himself not to be twitchy because they were out here in the open without a life signs detector. _No Wraith in that sky._

After a while, Mitchell pulled into a turnout, just off the highway, and they got out to sit on the hood and look up at the stars. The night air was dry and beginning to turn cool, even though the day's heat was still baked into the sandy ground. The moon was crystal bright, and there wasn't another car on the road, as far as John could see.

Mitchell shifted, edgy and restless, like John, still full of pent-up energy. "Never as bright," he commented.

"Yeah." John thought of Atlantica's night sky, never touched by industrial pollution, bright and clear, once strange and now familiar. He could try to tell Rodney and Teyla and Elizabeth about the F-302, try to get it across in words without sounding like he was fourteen. That probably wouldn't happen. They wouldn't get it until he could take them for a ride when the F-302s arrived in Atlantis. Then he remembered who else would have loved a ride in an F-302, and everything John had managed to forget today all came rushing back.

"What?" Mitchell said. Even in the moonlight, John's face must have given something away. His head was still half in the stars with the F-302, so distracted he had forgotten to be careful.

"Just thought about someone," John said reluctantly, then realized how that was open to misinterpretation. He explained, "One of my men is MIA."

"Lieutenant Ford." Mitchell's voice was serious, and of course he would have read the reports. "That's got to be..." He shook his head, wincing. "How's the search going?"

John felt a flush of gratitude, that Mitchell remembered who Ford was, that he had taken for granted that Atlantis was searching for him, and that John would get reports on the progress in the daily data exchange through the stargate. "Not so great. We had a plan, but it's not panning out. When I get back, I'll have to go over it again, re-think our assumptions."

Mitchell let out a long complicated grumbling sigh, which somehow conveyed endless painful experience with re-thinking assumptions.

They sat there for a while, listening to the wind and the silence. "We'd better get back," Mitchell said finally, still sounding restless, like this hadn't quite done it.

"Sure." It hadn't done it for John, either, whatever it was. He wasn't looking forward to going back to the SGC, to feeling the whole weight of the mountain on top of him. Sometime in the past year John had turned into an Atlantean, living in air and light and wind and endless ocean, or darting in a metal shell through dark limitless space. He would never feel right anywhere else.

And trying to catch some sleep in the SGC guest quarters, too much like an underground prison cell, would be impossible. He wasn't sleeping anywhere after this day, no way, probably not until he was in the middle of an important meeting tomorrow. But he didn't think Mitchell would be amenable to just sitting out here all night.

Forgetting he wasn't the one driving, he slid down off the hood and turned the wrong way, bumping into Mitchell. Since Mitchell was in the process of hopping energetically off the hood, the impact was solid, and Mitchell automatically caught him.

And for some reason, that did it.

They stood there for a long moment, frozen. Mitchell said, quietly, "You can trust me."

John kept his expression guarded. He had been half-expecting this, since Mitchell had suggested the drive. With just enough sarcasm to make his point, he said, "Because you're with SG-1."

"Yeah, that." Mitchell snorted, as if suddenly aware of the humor in the situation. "What would I say, that you jumped me? That'd look great on my record."

John mentally cycled through a half dozen paranoid scenarios in under a heartbeat, and then thought, _Fuck it._ Sometimes you just had to take a chance.

Then they were kissing, hard and urgent, and John wasn't sure who had started it. One of Mitchell's hands was on his hip, the other on the back of his neck, gripping him tightly. Mitchell's mouth tasted like stale coffee and the breathing gear they had worn in the F-302. John grabbed the back of his head and deepened the kiss until their teeth scraped. Mitchell moaned low in his throat, almost a growl, and the hand on John's hip slid down to palm his ass.

John was trying to pull Mitchell's pants open one-handed when Mitchell broke the kiss and swore. There was a confused moment where they both automatically tried to shift to a horizontal position, fumbling between the hood and the sandy pavement. Either was a really bad choice. Then Mitchell said, "Back seat."

John got there first, yanked the door open and tripped getting in, landing face down on the seat. He rolled over and Mitchell landed on top of him with an "oof." John tensed in an instant of panic, of standing outside himself. It was dark, cramped, hot and airless, he was pinned to dusty upholstery with a guy he barely knew on top of him, in the middle of nowhere in the desert. Barely back on Earth and his life was already doing that thing where it paralleled a bad Movie of the Week. Or maybe an After School Special, of the Don't Let This Happen to You variety. Then Mitchell shifted to the side, his weight off John, muttering, "Sorry."

John shook it off. Yeah, he knew he had PTSD, but he was still used to Atlantis, where everybody had it. He said, "Wait a second," and took his 9mm out of his pocket and stretched to push it just under the front seat. He could still get to it there but he wouldn't land on it when he inevitably ended up in the footwell. Mitchell put his gun in the back seat cupholder. Then he reached for the front of John's BDUs, working his hand in, pulling the buttons open, and John was back in the moment again.

It was awkward finding a good position; there just wasn't room enough for both of them. But John managed to push Mitchell back against the seat, got his pants open, and started to jerk him off slowly and deliberately. Mitchell pulled John's head down into a kiss, his fingers warm in John's hair. John kissed and bit and nuzzled his way down Mitchell's neck, their stubble rasping together.

Mitchell came hard, shuddering. John gave him a minute to ride it out, then shifted around, trying to fumble all these freaking clothes out of the way, meaning to rub off against Mitchell's hip. Then Mitchell half sat up and pushed John down on his back, pushing his legs apart. John tensed, startled, but Mitchell had a hand wrapped around John's dick and John wasn't going anywhere. Then Mitchell slid down between his thighs, and his mouth joined his hand.

John swore, dropping his head back off the seat and grabbing the door handle. He was still high and half out of his skin from the F-302, and this was almost too much. And it was obvious from the position Mitchell had pushed him into what he'd rather be doing, and that was hot, too. When Mitchell's hair brushed the inside of his thigh, John went over the edge.

John's head was still spinning when Mitchell pulled him out of the footwell. John slumped against the closed door and Mitchell leaned against the front seat, watching him.

_That was a little unexpected,_ John thought, still breathing hard. He was half-expecting Mitchell to freak out, for no other reason than John's generally lousy luck with this kind of thing, with relationships in general, from his high school crushes right up to his ex-wife. Then Mitchell grinned at him, and said, "There better be paper towels in the trunk."

John pretended to consider it. "We could tell them we were attacked by aliens," he offered.

On Atlantis, after the first few months, nobody had cared what anybody else did. They were probably stuck there forever, all the people in the galaxy that you could trust were in the city or on the Mainland, and everybody, scientists, Marines, and Athosians, had gotten to know each other a lot better. And Stackhouse and Markham had shacked up and Dr. Pierce came to the Athosian harvest festival in his best dress, and the fact that John swung both ways occasionally was far down on the list of what anybody worried about.

John hadn't been expecting to find anything like that here. But then, maybe SG-1 and the SGC were almost as isolated as Atlantis, in their own way.

They sat there in the quiet for a while, and John felt warm and bonelessly relaxed. Then Mitchell looked at his watch, hitting the dial to get the light. "Damn. Now we really need to get back."

"You keep saying that," John felt he had to point out.

"Yeah, it's my job. It sucks," Mitchell commented, sighing.

John snorted. "Your job does not suck."

Mitchell grinned wryly, and admitted, "No, it really doesn't."

  
**end**


End file.
